For us, summer's dolce far niente begins and ends with a good book. This is the selection that we will be reading (and re-reading) by the pool, under a parasol.
Ranging from classics to new authors, from realism to sci-fi, this selection will liven your summer and expand your mind before returning to the routine.
1. Love in the Time of Cholera- Gabriel García Márquez
This Latin-American literature classic will have you sailing away into a fantasy of magical realism that is as current as ever during a global pandemic.
2. Crome Yellow- Aldous Huxley
If you are having trouble getting into the summer mood, this youthful and vintage comedy will have you feeling like the summer you turned 15 all over again - both the good and the bad.
3. The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A classic deemed to never go out of style. It will inspire your dreams of glamour and have you questioning if our modern take on love is all that modern.
4. Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
This fictional dystopia from the Nobel-prize-winning author touches a fiber all too familiar when dealing with loss and memory.
The cult series is coming to the big (or medium?) screen later this year. Get ahead and delve into this sci-fi universe that will transport you to another planet.
6. The Lover - Marguerite Duras
Rekindle your desire for travel and love with this clandestine romance, a puzzle that perspires with the dense humidity of a foreign land and mourns the loss of youth and innocence.
The story set in late-sixties California is this Emma Cline's debut work. This fresh and well-written novel is a joy to the senses, and it will awaken a new perspective on the most ordinary and mundane.
8. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath’s only novel, semi-autobiographic, is a candid story about womanhood; a haunting American classic that feels too real and close.
9. Night and Day - Virginia Wolf
Virginia Wolf's delicate second novel is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman's role and the very nature of experience.